Abandoned wads

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So recently i was looking one of my hard drives for some backups and i found and old abandoned proyect that was interesting enough to share

Spoiler

I was really obsesed with the First blood movie and book idea of a man chased and hunted that i tought about making a proyect involving this idea.

I went as far as making a forest map, and a lot of coding for the soldiers that would hunt the player, stealth played a huge part since the enemies had some alert level similar to a metal gear game, and enemy sight was based on how much light was were the player was standing, also i added a lot system where you would recover items from dead bodies, and a day/night cycle, were during the night enemies would turn on flashlights to search the player

It was interesting, but i ran into a lot of problems with the maps, since doom AI it's quite dumb in terms of pathfinding, and making open maps were they would wander searching for the player got really troblesome (and time consuming), so in the end it was a proyect too huge for it's own good, anyway, here are a couple of screens

Did you guys ever worked on a proyect or map that for some reason got abandoned? i'd like to see some of them and hear why they got abandoned

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So recently i was looking one of my hard drives for some backups and i found and old abandoned proyect that was interesting enough to share

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I was really obsesed with the First blood movie and book idea of a man chased and hunted that i tought about making a proyect involving this idea.

I went as far as making a forest map, and a lot of coding for the soldiers that would hunt the player, stealth played a huge part since the enemies had some alert level similar to a metal gear game, and enemy sight was based on how much light was were the player was standing, also i added a lot system where you would recover items from dead bodies, and a day/night cycle, were during the night enemies would turn on flashlights to search the player

It was interesting, but i ran into a lot of problems with the maps, since doom AI it's quite dumb in terms of pathfinding, and making open maps were they would wander searching for the player got really troblesome (and time consuming), so in the end it was a proyect too huge for it's own good, anyway, here are a couple of screens

Did you guys ever worked on a proyect or map that for some reason got abandoned? i'd like to see some of them and hear why they got abandoned

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My first ever finished map, So you could pretty much see the evolution of how I map things. Except this will not run without Brutal Doom and BYHAE since I ripped a shitton of stuff from them. Because of that, this mapset was discontinued.

Super duper high tech techbase, with FAKE LIGHTING!

Holy Hostage:

Spoiler

I wanted to make a map for DUMP, and get out of my comfort zone by designing a large map, instead of the smaller quarter battles I normally love. The original was scaled REALLY big, this was the scaled down one. Stopped working on it because placing things on big maps are a bitch. Came back to it and saw it was in ZDoom format, ported it over but never got to repopulating it. Maybe someday...

The premise was a UAC facility recently fortified by hell.

Trenches:

Spoiler

Virtually almost complete map, designed for Gridlock 64. Between college taking a busy turn and me wondering if the premise was too gimicky, I never properly finished the map.

Multiple buildings connected by open land full of chaingunners, revenants, and maybe archviles. Use the trenches to stay in cover.

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This one map in particular was supposed to be the first map in an e4 replacement for Ultimate Doom, but it ended up being too big and out of control.

It happens to me sometimes, I end up with a map bigger than I wanted. My advice is to delete those sections you feel superfluous or repetitive and preserve those you remember the most or the ones you feel that capture the essence of that map.

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I dropped my very first project due to the mess it was because the evolution i had in modding/mapping for Doom.

Doom Reinforced had some of its maps pretty nice in the last iteration, though all the rest of the mod's content was a total mess, monsters from so many places, you literally could fight Octabrains from Duke Nukem in a room and suddently in the next fight you meet Half Life zombies, pick up the key and a trap with axe zombies from Blood could happen, between them you can also find a Weredragon from Heretic, well probably because you was using Corvus' crossbow for that encounter, but don't worry you can switch to Doom 3 shotgun at any time and if that gun runs out of ammo, you still have your Quake 3 railgun, all this surrounded by new decorations in 3D models while the internal ones was still sprites.

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This happens to me quite often, the last map i was working on, got too big for it's own good, so now i have to cut a lot of material... it really sucks to have spent so much time and realize that it isn't working

Temple of Life, this was supposed to be part of a megawad. This map actually did make it to Doomworld but I abandoned it because it was shit

DMP2014 attempt I think?

Ill-fated Temple of Life II

DMP2015 attempt, after some certain maps of Whispers of Satan (Hexenplutonia, as pcorf once called them) had a profound effect on me with their beautiful atmosphere. I'm still proud of this screenshot tbh :)

DMP2015 attempt 2, a remake of my Doom 2 In Name Only map, missed the deadline then lost it to a harddrive crash the following year. That one hurt.

NOVA III attempt, this one was in scotty's hands last I heard

JOM4 attempt, return of the rainbows

Seems a fair few screenshots have gone missing from my imgur (I'm sure I originally posted more shots of Catacombs II), so I wonder if those are now dead links in the picture thread...

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Shortly after I first started making my own maps when I was like 12 years old or around that age, I had a vision for my own Megawad! I dubbed it "The Invasion from Hell" (original originality!).

I came up with my own sort of story for it:

On Mercury (this wad's version of the planet would be literally made mostly of liquid mercury) for some reason, Doomguy is deployed to find out what happened to the series of UAC bases after they had all unanimously gone dark, a rescue team of twenty marines has already disappeared after reaching the planet. Upon reaching the planet, Doomguy is immediately attacked by demons and pretty much solves the mystery in ten seconds (the intermission screens would still act like there was some sort of mystery). After defeating all the demons in the first base, Doomguy finds ten of the twenty marines hiding in a holding cell (I don't know what my logic behind them still being alive was when I wrote it). Now Doomguy must fight his way from the first base to the second base, crossing bridges and rivers (the geography of this fictional version of the planet was very inconsistent) along the way. He eventually made it to the second base, finding it partially transformed by the demons (original originality!), when he suddenly got a message from an orbiting space station informing him that a Demon Spitter (Icon of Sin) had been detected on the planet beyond the second base. After clearing out the second base he found the other ten marines hiding in a holding cell (HOW ARE THEY STILL ALIVE AND HOW DID THEY GET THAT FAR?!? My 18 year old self asks my 12 year old self), the marines tell Doomguy where the Demon Spitter is (and piss off or something, I didn't come up with any explanation as to where they went or what they did after Doomguy finds them). After clearing out the second base, Doomguy descends upon the Mercuric surface and trudges his way to the Demon Spitter. After killing it, I don't remember what happens after that I haven't read the script since I wrote it six years ago.

~The End.

Now this completely original plot would probably work if there were some decent maps to back it up, but there simply wasn't. I was like 12 at the time and had only just started mapping. I had no knowledge of how to combine maps into the same .wad, I didn't and still don't know how to alter the text intermission screens (I have never messed with the actual code, and don't plan to anytime soon), I distinctly remember one of the maps being completely broken due to some kind of bug that caused everything to noclip past a certain point (I now think it may have been something to do with the map being too close to the grid boundaries). All my maps had shitty layouts, nonsensical texture work (thank god for auto align), One map was in the shape of the Spider-Man logo for no particular reason (and no, it was nothing like the map in E3 that is shaped like a hand, that map was actually good, this one wasn't), one map contained a room that was shaped like a child's primitive drawing of a boat for no reason, one map was a castle populated entirely by Cyberdemons, one map was a shitty maze that was very poorly laid out, one map was a bridge overlooking a skybox made of the face texture scrolling left because I didn't know how to make a proper skybox and the list goes on with shitty maps made by a person who was still just beginning and had no idea what they were doing at the time. I still have those maps, I might put them together and release them as a sort of record of how far I've come (that won't happen until after I release an actual mapset, my first public release won't be total shit!).

I could dig them out and take some screenshots of their mass terrible, but I'm too lazy to do that right now.

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My biggest problem is that I make my levels way too long and end up getting burnt out in the detail phase. The majority of my maps never see completion for this reason. I'm also a sucker for ZDoom effects. All of my maps end up being so inundated with control sectors, scripts, and overlapping 3D effects that the map becomes impossible to follow.

I need to implement a system to regulate how much "eye candy" I put in my maps and establish a maximum size to build in. Then maybe I'll finally make a map that's beatable in under 5 minutes without speedrunning.

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@Eris Falling Those screenshots look really nice. Good use of lighting, some of them very moody, and that "Return of The Rainbows" thing was deliciously colored. So if you can make nice-looking maps, I have to ask, why do you abandon them? What went wrong?

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@Steve D Thanks! I think the problem is that I tend to only have an idea for a single area when starting a map, so I make that area and then it's like, "uh now what." For my latest mapping endeavour I actually planned out a layout on paper and now the map itself is very nearly finished, barring thing placement and polishing, although I haven't touched it in nearly 2 months, so I really need to get back to it at some point.

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I decided to do that thing I mentioned in my last post. Here are some screenshots from MAP19 of The Invasion from Hell, DANGER! SHIT INCOMING!:

Spoiler

A bird's eye view of the map, which for some reason was built on the grid boundary...

The starting area... Jesus it looks shit...

This map, as you should be able to tell, is very bare and devoid of anything interesting...

An Icon of Sin guards the blue key for no particular reason... It isn't functional or anything I put it there as decoration... Also note how the yellow key markers stretch to the top of the room... I did not at this time know how to delete sectors and make them solid, so I must have consciously decided to lift them to the ceiling...

Not sure what the hell I was thinking when I put this ungodly drop here...

When I first started making maps I for some reason thought it would be cool to add what my 12-year old self called "super secrets". They were all Wolfenstein themed, did not appear on the automap and did nothing more than make it way too hard to get 100% kills or items. They didn't even count as regular secrets! Also note that this is the only part of the map to contain a Cyberdemon, in spite of the map literally being called 'CYBERDEMONS CASTLE', so if you didn't find the super secret, you would not have fought one!

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Most of the stuff shown on this thread looks good, even if the author was not satisfied with the results. Am I the only one that is going to show stuff that was never released due to the eventual realization that my early maps were shit, looked like shit, played like shit and didn't deserve the bytes it would take up on the 2-3 YB internet humanity has produced?

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@Eris Falling I'm interested to see the rest of Eridian Twilight and DMP2015 attempt #1 now.

This map started as the map for an abandoned Hacx episode, then got adapted to a map for the abandoned Operation Body Count remake (which I later redid from scratch), then finally found a home in Project Einherjar Episode 2. Essentially this map was like that lady who survived all those shipwrecks in a row, including the titanic.